Amazon has made a significant investment of $2.75 billion in the artificial intelligence startup Anthropic. This latest investment brings Amazon’s total stake in the San Francisco-based company to $4 billion. The initial investment of $1.25 billion was made in September, and the recent infusion completes the commitment Amazon made at that time to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic.
Anthropic is known for its generative AI and the Claude 3 family of models, which demonstrate advanced intelligence, near-human levels of responsiveness, improved steerability and accuracy, and new vision capabilities. These models are accessible on Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). As part of the agreement between the two companies, Anthropic is using AWS as its primary cloud provider and will utilize AWS Tranium and Inferentia chips for its future AI models. Additionally, Anthropic has made a long-term commitment to provide AWS customers with access to future generations of its foundation models on Amazon Bedrock.
The strategic collaboration is aimed at improving customer experiences and leveraging generative AI, which is considered to be one of the most transformational technologies of our time. Amazon’s investment in Anthropic is part of a broader trend of big tech companies investing in AI startups to stay ahead in the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence. This move by Amazon is its largest outside investment in its three-decade history and reflects the company’s ambition to gain an edge in generative artificial intelligence.
Anthropic competes with other AI companies like OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and was founded by former OpenAI research executives and employees. The company’s product, Claude, directly competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT in both the enterprise and consumer markets. Anthropic’s most recent suite of AI models, Claude 3, is said to outperform competitors like OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini Ultra in various industry benchmarks.
The investment also comes at a time when U.S. antitrust regulators are reviewing such investments amid growing public and business interest in AI technology. Despite the scrutiny, Amazon maintains that its venture investing does not constitute round tripping, a practice that can be illegal if aimed at misleading investors.
